Literary pretendings, off-the-cuff insights and the occasional rant.

"He creates - and at the same time affirms - the dark we’ve all got inside us."

Over at The Rumpus, Peter Orner reflects on William Trevor's short story "The Dressmaker's Child" (from Cheating at Canasta) and its parallel to his own experience.

A month ago, reading a William Trevor story, I became overcome by an unnerving feeling, a sensation that morphed, two or three pages in, to one of absolute recognition. I must have read the story in 2007 when the book first came out, or maybe even earlier in a magazine. I didn’t finish "The Dressmaker’s Child" for a second time. Nor will I finish it. Why the need to read it again when, in my own way, I’ve been living it, re-reading it, for years now?

Trevor and Orner are two of my favorite writers, and I'm very pleased to see that Orner and I share admiration for the great Irishman. Besides his fiction, Orner's Lonely Voice columns at The Rumpus are consistently rewarding.